Opposition Rallies Its Ranks in Kenya, Peacefully

A rally of Kenya’s opposition on Monday commemorated the birth of the country’s multiparty democracy movement 24 years ago.

Tyler Hicks / The New York Times

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

July 7, 2014

NAIROBI — They started streaming in at dawn on Monday, thousands of people, the crowd slowly building as the sun rose. Men in rubber swamp boots. Men in thin suits. Men in raggedy trousers and ripped T-shirts, men from the slums.

Monday was supposed to be their day, the day of the long-awaited Saba Saba rally called by Kenya’s opposition to commemorate the birth of the multiparty democracy movement 24 years ago. While many people in Nairobi had been scared for weeks that this rally would set off riots, and much of the city had cleared out on Monday and was crawling with riot police officers, opposition supporters were hoping to hear a new plan for the future.

“Nothing comes without fighting for it,” said Anthony Oduor, who works in an Internet cafe and spent five hours on his feet waiting for the opposition leaders to show up.

When they did, in a convoy of fancy sport utility vehicles, they quickly denounced the government, accusing it of playing tribal politics, being numb to poverty and being caught flat-footed by a number of recent terrorist attacks.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by two fugitives!” cried Otieno Kajwang, an opposition party senator, referring to the fact that both Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy, William Ruto, face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Both men have been cooperating, so the label of “fugitive” was not accurate, though it revealed the level of poisonous bombast now circulating in the country’s politics.

Mr. Kenyatta has said that many of Kenya’s ills, like the security services’ weakness and corruption, are deep-seated and that he needs time to fix them. He has been in office little more than a year.

But on Monday, opposition supporters were already chanting, “Uhuru must go!”

The opposition leaders, many in their 50s and 60s, danced on stage as the crowd stood in the sun and watched. In Swahili, Saba Saba means Seven Seven, a reference to the date when the first pro-democracy rallies were held in Nairobi in 1990. Monday’s rally ended with the presentation of 13 resolutions, including the threat of “commercial sanctions against companies which continue to ignore our plight” by setting prices too high.

But the promise of a new day seemed to dissipate the instant the rally ended, at dusk. The opposition leaders had not called for a sit-in, as many supporters had hoped. Some young men cursed at police officers as they left, but most people filed out without incident. They walked quietly up the darkening roads, almost reluctantly, back to the iron shanties in the slums that are their homes.